Many of today's digital camera manufacturers seek to provide cameras that operate in virtually a point and shoot approach, where the user might need to merely point the lens of a camera towards an image, and expect that the camera does “all the rest.” One of those actions often included in “all the rest,” is “autofocus.” Autofocus systems are often arranged to automatically focus the image of a scene onto photo sensors within the camera. Many of the autofocus systems, however, require a significant amount of time to accomplish the autofocus task, sometimes known as shutter lag time. Other systems attempt to minimize this shutter lag time by employing costly additional optical components that may obstruct a camera's optical path during the autofocus operation. This obstruction may result in disallowing ‘live previews’ and image capture of a scene during the autofocus operation. Proposed solutions to these problems may further require the development and use of special lens designs that are costly, or otherwise not practical to implement in many of today's cameras. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.